Ma Moos's hole

Found it! Ma moos's hole! With great trepidation I have been going into the bags of dog biscuits: will there be a mouse in them or not? And adopting a preliminary test of thumping the bags with a wooden spoon in case there is, so it can get out of the bag before my fingers engage upon its body thereby giving me cause to emit yet again a series of high pitched squeals.

So when I am feeding Bools, Lester is normally sitting at the table also waiting to be fed. Trying to make discrete bangs on the bags without him knowing what I am doing has been difficult. I mean, I'm not lying to him about the mouse: I'm just not telling him we have one.

Now I am very aware that camping and food-hygiene are not particularly twin partners. Many are the times when I have to swot off a nesting slug or snail, and I am alert therefore to trails which give evidence of any visitors which are not particularly healthy if bits are eaten. This includes mice. I KNOW we are not infested because I would have SEEN the evidence, even if my eyesight is not what it used to be. So I feel SAFE that we are not being attacked by mice-infections. However, Lester has a tendency to go freaky about mice: in one of our previous houses I argued for holistic trapping of the moos in the hoos, which unfortunately ended up with us being a hotel for loads of them. We had to put traps down. For several nights the traps would go off with alarming regularity. I think we must have lethally caught a couple of dozen: not holistically. Holistic mouse traps don't seem to work. The real ones do though. So 'see' one mouse, and he 'sees' the breeding capacity of it. I just do a squeal, thinking it will run up my leg.

Oh so anyway: lovely morning. Lester standing beside me, enjoying the sunshine. Me pegging out the washing. All very chummy. And now the sheets.
"Hold that end" I says to Lester, handing him a corner of the duvet. Up it goes. Onto the line. No probs.
So now the sheet, the same, handing him a corner.
"What's that?" he says pointing to an empty piece of sheet.
"Oh blast" I says, "must have got ripped in the washing machine".
"No it didn't - those are TEETH marks -"......

Et voila! The mouse hole has been found! At this moment it is hanging up in the air with the remainder of the sheet surrounding it. Not sure what the mouse is going to do about this minor inconvenience. Probably go make another one somewhere else, preferably not in the washing pile, in particular anything belonging to Lester, bless him!